Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2006-09-18/Citizendium

A new Wikipedia fork, Citizendium, will be launched within the next few weeks, according to project coordinator, Wikipedia co-founder, and "chief organizer" Larry Sanger.

Citizendium's website describes the project:


 * The Citizendium (sit-ih-ZEN-dee-um), a "citizens' compendium of everything," will be an experimental new wiki project that combines public participation with gentle expert guidance. It will begin life as a "progressive fork" of Wikipedia.  But we expect it to take on a life of its own and, perhaps, to become the flagship of a new set of responsibly-managed free knowledge projects.  We will avoid calling it an "encyclopedia," because there will probably always be articles in the resource that have not been vouched for in any sense.

The project would be editable only by creating an account and providing a real name. "Authors" (as Citizendium "editors" are called) would be able to edit the site. "Editors" are experts who must provide credentials, and who resolve editing disputes on pages relating to their area of study. "Constables" would be community managers (not like administrators on Wikipedia).

The project is, according to Sanger, independent of Digital Universe, a similar project with which Sanger was involved.

The announcement was not accompanied by a great deal of press attention; at press time, a ZDNet blog post was the closest to mainstream media coverage that the project had received.